Maximize ROI On Digital Marketing Spend With Digital Experience Optimization

Content is the engine of marketing strategy and execution; it’s what drives campaigns that attract, engage, acquire, and retain your audience. The aim for marketers is to ensure that customers can find the content they’re looking for, easily navigate the path to address their need, and ultimately convert and develop brand loyalty.

However, in today's digital landscape, customer expectations are continually evolving. Compounding the challenge, marketers are tasked with doing more with less: create more engaging content for more channels and drive more conversions, but with the same or shrinking budgets.

Marketing teams have historically looked at content creation and content delivery as two separate endeavors, neither very streamlined or optimized. Disjointed systems and processes make scaling difficult, contribute to overspending on content creation, create an over-reliance on paid search, and inhibit performance measurement that proves the ROI of digital marketing spend. 

These challenges can’t be solved simply by working harder. They require coordinated content creation and marketing campaign processes that work together so teams can build the right content, get it everywhere it needs to be, understand what is (and isn’t) working, and use performance data to shape future content creation, delivery, and presentation. 

When done right, the result is a highly effective content lifecycle that delivers maximum value from your content and broader marketing investments, helping you stay ahead of your customers (and your competition) – and digital experience optimization is an essential component of a successful strategy.

What is digital experience optimization and why is it important? 

Digital experience optimization inherently acknowledges that customers are empowered. That is, whether you are a B2B or B2C organization or any variation thereof, you know that your customers have access to an enormous amount of information at their fingertips across a myriad of digital channels – and they expect to get the information they want, in the moment they need it, and in the way they want it. If they don’t get it from you, they move on to a competitor. 

This means that, from the moment a customer encounters your brand online (typically via search), the mandate for marketing teams is to provide an intuitive, cohesive path that allows visitors to discover who you are, what you do, and why you provide the best product or solution for them.

When you employ digital experience optimization, you gain a better understanding of how and why customers engage with your content, giving you critical insight to:

• Improve content findability: When you know what users are looking for and why they visit your website, you can make more informed decisions about which related topics to cover and which keywords to use in the content you create. The outcome? You’ll increase your brand’s position in organic search rankings, leading to greater awareness and traffic to your digital properties. In turn, you can rebalance your investments in paid search to further increase your reach, or even reduce your spend on paid programs, lowering your customer acquisition cost. 
• Create more customer-centric journeys: With greater knowledge of visitor interests, behaviors, and preferences, you can develop more effective, personalized journeys that resonate with your customers. The outcome? A more productive customer journey informed by the “next best” content, experience, or offer that helps every user easily navigate their way to a desired solution. The overall improvement in customer engagement can not only pay dividends through increased conversion, but also higher average order value and repeat business. In addition, the ability to test and make iterative changes to your website means you can validate decisions before implementing them, saving time and resources.
• Grow market reach through digital accessibility: Consider that the World Health Organization estimates one in six people globally face significant disabilities. Building a more accessible web is good for business, and a complete digital experience optimization approach should help you identify accessibility barriers that hinder people with disabilities from accessing your content. The outcome? Data from McKinsey highlights that, in the U.S. alone, brands are losing up to $6.9 billion annually to their competitors who prioritize accessibility. Prioritizing compliance with digital accessibility guidelines ensures you don’t miss out on growth opportunities. Moreover, websites with enhanced accessibility features tend to achieve higher SEO rankings. 
• Prove business impact: Identifying the basis behind successful campaigns gives you the clarity to determine which high-performing activities to replicate and which low-value activities to cut, which boosts overall marketing efficiency and agility. The outcome? In today's climate of doing more with less, accurately measuring content's impact on key business metrics isn’t just essential for fiscal responsibility and strategic planning – it’s the difference between a marketing organization that is seen as a profit center vs. one that is seen as a cost center.

Start your digital experience optimization journey with Acquia

The way users engage with brands online – and their expectations for those experiences – have changed. If you want to meet the demands of customers as well as business stakeholders who are asking for increased growth and profitability, then digital experience optimization needs to be part of your approach to driving content and campaign performance.

Acquia Digital Experience Optimization (DXO) is built to make your digital experience optimization efforts easier to achieve. It offers a comprehensive set of capabilities including content SEO, accessibility, testing and experimentation, and performance management to help organizations create and manage content more efficiently, optimize content and channels for better performance, and use insights to drive greater focus and ROI. 

To learn more about how you can maximize the ROI of your marketing content spend, check out our e-book, “A Fresh Approach to Digital Experience Optimization (DXO),” which shares more about how to apply digital experience optimization to your content and campaign workflows. If you want to see more about the capabilities of our DXO solution, get in touch with an Acquia expert. We’d love to show you.